The Hidden Treasure
up in my Burberry, to the chagrin of the Philosopher, who felt
I was robbing him of his garment. And as the dusk was
falling, we stumbled back among the obliterated terraced
gardens of the city, to the hut by the mill.
This was a bad night, our host being so poor and his carpets
full of bugs. The barley crop had failed this year, and he
allowed me to give him two krans with which he wandered
off to buy our horses' dinner from luckier neighbours who
still had some in store. Otherwise he would accept nothing.
" What I have, I give you. What is not here, you cannot
have," he said with the unconscious dignity that comes of true
courtesy. But I learnt the poverty of the little family from
the wife, for she put my fourpence into a fold of her garment
whence it dropped out and was lost, and I found her sobbing
as she baked our bread as if her heart would break.
Poor as they were, these people had two guests poorer than
themselves, a widow woman and her daughter from Lakistan
across the river. " The widow and the fatherless and the
stranger." Among the nomads one realizes the Bible sorrow
of these words; the absolute want of protection, the bitter
coldness of charity when obligations of kinship or hospitality
have ceased to count. These two women worked about
the fields for their small share of die household bread, until
they must wander on, weak, helpless, and indifferent to their
own fate as driftwood.
They were not a likeable type; they had the narrow, foxy
faces and shifty eyes that I remembered in northern Luristan,
unpleasing in a successful robber, but ten times more so when
he has become a cringing victim of fate. Some war or raid
had driven them from their home: they fingered my belongings
with an eye to begging what they could, ready to steal if
possible. What little I gave only made them ask for more.
The young mistress of the hut, who, with her old husband
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